50 Days of AI History, Harms, and Hopes

Learn by doing with a new exercise every weekday for 10 weeks

In a brightly lit workshop with natural light streaming in, a young woman and a young man are intently and happily working on a complex robot placed on a cluttered table. They are both dressed in casual attire. The workshop is a blend of old and new, with clocks visible in the background, conveying an atmosphere of creativity and innovation.

Let's Build Something, latent space "photography" by Colarusso

David Colaursso
This collection is based on a series originally published in the winter of 2024. New content was added in August 2026.

As an experiential educator, I firmly believe experience is an excellent teacher. So, let's build some stuff. In the process we might just gain some perspective on this whole generative AI craze.

I teach law students about technology, and a few years back I created the LIT Prompts browser extension to help them explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs). You can run the extension for Firefox or for Chrome.

Over the next 10 weeks, I'll update this page with short posts on the history, harms, and hopes surrounding AI, including exercises for you to run inside LIT Prompts. We'll be plugging into the technology that runs tools like ChatGPT, giving you a level of control that most people don't see. You won't have to do any "coding," but we will think like coders. We'll try to introduce some rigor by thinking about workflows and systems, not just "chatbots." You'll be supported by the fact that LIT Prompts lets you produce reusable interconnecting prompt templates. This will let us build on what we learn and improve our practice over time. It will also allow us to explore some agentic behavior. You'll experience the promise and perils of this new technology through building custom interactions/workflows. Plus, I'm pretty sure we'll have fun along the way.

Week 1

Micro-Lessons (Tuesday-Thursday): An explanation of how to build an artificial neural network

Using AI to Distill and Question Texts: Summarize and question the contents of a webpage from within the browser
A Rose by Any Other Name: Define a selected word, phrase, idiom, or initialism on a webpage
I'm Sorry, Dave Can't Do That: Use the text of an email to draft a polite reply declining any request(s)
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: Define a selected word, phrase, idiom, or initialism given the context of the webpage on which it is found
Flip a Poem; Roll an "App": Turn the outcome of a coin flip into a poem and package this as an "app"

Week 2

Micro-Lessons (Monday-Thrusday): Learn how to turn words into numbers with word2vec

AI Ouroboros: Can Today's "AI" Build Yesterday's?: Using LLMs to suggest features for linear and logistic regression models
Give Me the Recipe, Not an SEO-Motivated Short Essay: For an online "recipe page," return just the recipe absent extraneous verbiage
Add Email Asks to My To-Do List: Find the "asks" in an email; produce a bulleted list of same; add these to a to-do list; save to a file
The Dream of Universal Translation: Translate text into English then translate your reply into the original language
A Poem for the Moment: Turn the time of day into a poem